If You Lie

                                          If you lie in the summer, don't hang around in the fall.

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Everything's Bad

     Everything's bad Michael, everything. You can't escape it or fight it. You've got to get along with it. Deal with it, make terms.

Lady from Shanghai
Orson Welles
1948

Hard to Dance

Down by the Riverside motel
It's ten below and falling
By a ninety-nine cent store
She closed her eyes and started swaying
But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Oh your old hometown's so far away
But inside your head there's a record that's playing

Hold On
(Brennan/Waits)
Tom Waits

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Dark Femmes #28

Myung-Sook - The Housemaid (1960)

Rachael - Blade Runner

Sherry Peatty - The Killing

Natalie Bellsario - The Cooler

Racquel Serrano - Kneeling Goddess

Abigail Martin - Christmas Holiday

Bridget Gregory - Last Seduction

Annie Laurie Starr - Gun Crazy

Belle - Belle et Bete

Rita/Camilla Rhodes - Mulholland Drive

Sheila Bennet - Killer That Stalked New York

Carol Lakewood Morton - This World, Then the Fireworks

Marsha Mitchell - Storm Warning

Claire Quimby - Tension

Mona Demarkov - Romeo Bleeding

Carol Richman - Phantom Lady

Helene Desvallees - The Unfaithful Wife

Kathie Moffat - Out of the Past

A Rigged Game

          The system worked because felons and misdemeanants plead guilty most of the time and did not file nuisance appeals routinely. The system worked because pre-breakdown jail time was doable. Criminals were pre-psychologized. They accepted authority. They knew they were lowlife scum because they saw it on TV and read it in the papers. They were locked into a rigged game. Authority usually won.

My Dark Places
James Ellroy
1996

His Rope

       Eddie Coyle is a small-time loser at the end of his rope, but the marvelous thing about Mitchum is that he doesn't play him as a groveling, uncourageous man. He imparts to the role a quiet dignity the character in the book lacked. I think Mitchum radiates a genuine presence. Above all, you can say about Mitchum that he is.

excerpt from
Robert Mitchum : The Last Celluloid Desperado
Grover Lewis
Rolling Stone - 1973

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Friends of Eddie Coyle
Peter Yates
1973

Lost Life

 

Lost Life
(Pepper)
Art Pepper

A State of Affairs

         Chinatown connotes color and in a larger sense the hidden twoness of things. It is both a place and a state of affairs, part of Los Angeles and Los Angeles itself. At the end, we learn that Noah Cross "owns the police", that the cover-up Gittes detested in Chinatown extends all over. To paraphrase Marlowe's Mephistopheles ; Why this is Chinatown, nor am i out of it.

except from
Norman Holland
A Sharper Focus

Self Portrait #33

Phillipe Halsman

Rene Groebli

Leon Herschritt

Angelo Rizzuto

Dennis Hopper

Nacho Lopez

Saul Leiter

Lee Miller

Vivian Maier

Herbert List

Downpour of Shadows #32

Un Flic

Gun Crazy

The Verdict (1982)

Underworld USA

Nightmare Alley (2021)

Three Days of the Condor

Veronika Voss

Deadly Affair

Among the Living

Angel Heart

Carol

Bitter Stems

End of the Affair

Une si Jolie Petite Plage

Le Samourai

Lies Had Deserted

                       Lies had deserted me and i felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

Graham Greene

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Tim Shorten